Monthly briefings · 7 published
Digests
A short, sourced brief every month: scholarly publications, exhibitions, new attributions, and the month's reading from the corpus. Every item traceable to a named publisher.
2026
- SEP
September 2026
Six articles. The Met's two solitary Jizō descents show Amida's welcoming-descent schema borrowed for another bodhisattva, and the Thirteen Buddhas map deities onto the memorial services from the seventh day to the thirty-third year. The Mikkyō half is about Esoteric Buddhism as a documentary system: the twelve devas as a ritual perimeter, five siddhaṃ syllables that are the deities they name, and the zuzō compendia that kept iconography exact.
- AUG
August 2026
Ten articles. Mikkyō dominates: the vajra bell and pestle read as the two halves of one rite, three Fudō paintings told apart by body colour, Hannya Bosatsu rescued from the nō mask, and a Kamakura sheet that prints Fudō a hundred times. Two arhat pieces turn on counting, sixteen named against five hundred numbered. A method piece on dating Buddhist painting, Kaikei's An'ami-style Amida, and the Hakuin line's second generation round out the month.
- JUL
July 2026
Eleven articles. The Kannon cluster returns to the forms no sutra authorises: Gyoran out of a Chinese folk legend, Koyasu out of late-Ming Songzi Guanyin, Fudaraku as a place rather than a figure. Two disambiguation tables address the confusions that produce actual museum mislabels — the four principal honzon, and three armoured guardian sets. Kaikei's signature apparatus answers June's Unkei attribution problem, and the month closes on the welcoming descent with the retinue removed.
- JUN
June 2026
Ten articles across the month, at a three-day cadence. After May's cluster sprint the corpus turns from icons to the apparatus that produced them: the copybook the painting workshop transmitted, the crystal eye that changed the Kamakura gaze, the inscriptions that secure an Unkei attribution and the far larger body that has none. Two paired readings — the Daihannya-e box and its altar icon; honji-suijaku doctrine and its Shingon shrine mandala.
- MAY
May 2026
Fifty-six articles ship across the month. The Mikkyō cluster closes — Fudō, Aizen, and the Five Wisdom Kings disambiguation — and six of the seven principal Kannon variants get their iconographic reading. Byōdō-in's 1053 Amida by Jōchō anchors Heian Pure Land sculpture; Tōdai-ji's 1203 Niō anchor the Kei-school collaboration. Hakuin's Daruma opens the late-Edo Zen portraiture sub-cluster.
- APR
April 2026
The first month of publishing. Twenty-seven articles ship — Pure Land and Kannon dominate, the Kei-school sculptural turn opens, and a methodological piece — How bodhi reads an image — frames the editorial discipline for the readers who arrive in the first wave.
- MAR
March 2026
March is the month the editorial contract gets written down. The four-source floor, the per-tier image policy, and the ColBase verbatim attribution decision are committed to the project's public operating manual. Foundations before publication.